If there's one consistent piece of criticism that gets lobbed in Canonical's and Mark Shuttleworth's direction, it's that they do not contribute enough code - or anything else for that matter - to the Free software world. Mark Shuttleworth has apparently had enough, and has written a very, very lengthy blog post detailing how he feels about this criticism.

But that's not what they are saying, read Mark Shuttleworth's blog post; he compares Ubuntu to GNOME, X, linux kenrel, etc. He wants to confuse people into thinking that Canonical is part of the community. That's is a lie, nothing more than a PR stunt.

Pfft. You're talking about lying and then you throw claims like that out? Talk about hypocrisy!

Face it, Canonical does a whole LOT of stuff that no one else does and as such, they DO collaborate and take part in the whole Linux community. Code is definitely not the only thing one can contribute and definitely not the most important part either.

Pfft. You're talking about lying and then you throw claims like that out? Talk about hypocrisy!

I didn't make the claim, dragossh was the one that said "Ubuntu doesn't care about being about a member of the community", I just said that that's not what Mark said in his post.

There is clearly a mismatch, here, except that the people that have criticized Canonical have provided strong evidence; undeniable data. From the total amount of contributions, Canonical is about 0.01% of the total.

Face it, Canonical does a whole LOT of stuff that no one else does and as such, they DO collaborate and take part in the whole Linux community. Code is definitely not the only thing one can contribute and definitely not the most important part either.

"Collaborating requires code contributions"... So, no other kind of collaboration is actually collaboration, only the kind _you_ want? If I wrote a 500 page book for newcomers to Linux it wouldn't be beneficial to the community and I should rather just write code? That is a REALLY narrow way of seeing things.

And then again, claiming all the stuff Ubuntu does benefit _only_ Ubuntu is again incorrect. F.ex. all the themes they've made are available for all. So are the forums, irc channels etc. And I've seen plenty of people even from other distros go and use those resources for help and discussion. That's direct community contribution. Also, on the whole, Ubuntu has made Linux a whole lot more known among the general audience than it was before, and probably more so than all the other distros together. Unquantifiable contribution yes, but contribution nevertheless!